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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26042824">to be burdened with this crown</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/kickedshins/pseuds/kickedshins'>kickedshins</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>fellas is it gay to attempt to kill your best friend of twenty-five years [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Dimension 20 (Web Series)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Could Be Canon, Flashbacks, M/M, TWENTY FIVE YEAAARS GUYS, brennan: calroy would not consider himself a traitor, me: guess i have to write a gay fic about this!, takes place post e9, technically, this all came out of me in one go at 4:30am jesus</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 09:00:06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,553</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26042824</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/kickedshins/pseuds/kickedshins</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>In the history books, his portrait will be spotless. In the history books, he’ll have washed his skin clean, no spots to be found. In the history books, there’ll be no ghost behind his shoulder. There’ll be nothing but Calroy and his smile and his crown. Calroy and his country and throne.</p><p>Calroy watches his king fall, and Calroy doesn’t feel like a traitor. Doesn’t feel like he’s committing any unholy acts of treason. Calroy watches his king fall, and Calroy feels the birthright a self-made man is owed drop into his red-flecked hands.</p><p>or</p><p>Calroy, Amethar, the years and romance of the past, and the future Calroy is determined to craft, divinatory sisters of the king be damned.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Calroy Cruller/Amethar Rocks</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>fellas is it gay to attempt to kill your best friend of twenty-five years [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1904170</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>32</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>to be burdened with this crown</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>literally fuckign sat down banged all this out in one go on like no sleep its 5:30am i feel insane. please enjoy i just have a lot of calmethar feelings. super unbeta'd.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Calroy stabs Amethar, and he can hear a nation labeling him a traitor. There’s so much that goes into the brutal, subtle, gorgeous art of politics, and Calroy knows there’ll be repercussions for his actions, but all that gets swept away in the sound of dagger striking against bone. A sharp <em> tuc </em>and all Calroy can think of is how comfortable it would be to sit atop a throne.</p><p>He pulls the dagger out. What’s left of it, at least. The poison seeps into a man whose side he stood by for over twenty years, and part of him wishes he felt more remorse. After all, he loves Amethar. How couldn’t he? Twenty-five years is a long, long time, and Amethar is, unfortunately, a very lovable person.</p><p><em> Amethar </em> , he wants to say, <em> I’m not doing this because of you. Amethar </em> , he wants to say, <em> this isn’t personal, I promise. Amethar </em> , he wants to say, <em> you did not deserve to be burdened with this crown. You did not deserve the hardships that come with power. You should not have lived that long; it would have been a mercy for me to slit your throat years ago. It would have been a mercy for me to have killed your entire family in their sleep. It would have been a mercy to get to you and to your wife </em> —wife, he thinks, is such a spiteful word, such an unloving word, a title devoid of any real emotion, because after all, it’s not as if Caramelinda loves Amethar, is it? It’s not as if she has any sort of romantic feelings towards him, is it?— <em> before the twins came along. It would have been a mercy to have never started this long con in the first place </em>.</p><p>Calroy doesn’t say any of that, of course. He’s smarter than that. He’s better than that. He’s put together, and he isn’t faltering, and the weight of Amethar under his palms is something so familiar that it almost feels like old times when he shoves the king off of the parapets. It almost feels like the Ravening War, like illicit meetings against the trunk of a tree, like a future that could never be theirs.</p><p> </p><p>“My sister,” Amethar had gasped, and Calroy had frowned, because it’s generally considered bad form to bring up one’s sister in the middle of making out with your friend.</p><p>“Your sister?” Calroy had asked, calm, put together, not at all disheveled. Not a mess the way Amethar was.</p><p>“My sister,” Amethar had repeated. “Lazuli. She could—look, this is, like, very stupid, and I get it if you don’t want to know, but she could. I don’t know. Tell us how this was all gonna end up?”</p><p>Calroy had laughed, laughed loud and clear and unashamed. He had laughed with the intention to make Amethar feel ashamed, and even then, something frighteningly close to shame and an apology twisted in his stomach, around his heart. Pulling at his strings, making his jaw tense, making his hands clammy.</p><p>“What’s that all about?” Amethar had asked, somewhere in between amused and offended.</p><p>“Really, Amethar,” Calroy had laughed, “if you think that you need an oracle to tell your future, you must be deeply insecure. It’s your own future, man! Yours to shape, yours to mold. Prosperity is a thing you make. Fate is– well, to be frank, fate is bullshit, if you forgive my using such language in front of nobility.”</p><p>Amethar had buried his face in the crook of Calroy’s neck and had said, “Oh, you know I don’t mind your mouth,” and had smiled.</p><p>And Calroy could feel it now, that smile. He could feel it against his neck, against his mouth. He could feel Amethar, his king, his friend, his– well, his <em> something. </em>Something he never should have let Amethar become.</p><p>“So,” Amethar had said, “you’re saying you don’t trust Lazuli?”</p><p>Calroy had laughed, frighteningly breathy. Calroy didn’t get <em> breathy </em>. Calroy was put together, a corset laced tight, an unopenable wine bottle. Calroy was not the fire of Rococoa or the compassion of Citrina or the bluntness of Lazuli or Sapphria’s pokes to the side. Calroy was not Caramelinda and her arched brows, Caramelinda and her tailored dresses. Calroy was something more than that. He was… he was… well, he was falling apart under Amethar’s ministrations, and, despite everything, he absolutely loved it.</p><p>“I’m,” Calroy had forced out, “I’m not saying I don’t trust Lazuli. What I’m saying is she sees many futures, but that we can make something outside of that. Divination is crap, to be honest.”</p><p>Amethar had pulled Calroy closer, pressed a kiss where his neck met his shoulder. “Really? And what if what she saw was– well, what if she saw was us, Cal? Would that still be crap?”</p><p> </p><p>Amethar’s weight is so familiar. The planes of his back, of his shoulders. His neck tense. His crown askance. Calroy plucks that crown, now, plucks it right off of Amethar’s head, and feels unfulfilled. Feels like he’s missing something.</p><p>Calroy watches Amethar fall. Calroy smiles. Calroy wears a crown and lets no one stand by his side. He knows what it means to have the rug pulled under from you. He isn’t going to let himself trust the way Amethar did. He isn’t a fool like Amethar. He isn’t– well, he isn’t stupid, and he isn’t naive, and he’s going to take care of himself, and he’s not going to be softened by any ridiculous proclamations of love, and as he watches Amethar fall, he sort of wants to dive down after him.</p><p> </p><p>“If she’d seen us,” Calroy had said, “I’d still question her. Divination is– ah, divination is an improper science. Fallible. Too much room for discrepancy, for interpretation. Besides, why believe your sister when I could believe myself? Why put a job into another person’s hands when I’m perfectly skilled at doing it myself?”</p><p>“You’re so cynical, Cal,” Amethar had mumbled, voice muffled by Calroy’s skin. His hands had pulled, tugged, too big, too rough, too everywhere. At Calroy’s back, his waist, his ass, and, <em> oh, </em>this was not appropriate for being less than a mile from the place where they’d made camp. “And so controlling.”</p><p>“Aw, don’t tell me you’re complaining about that,” Calroy had smirked.</p><p>“Sure as hell am not,” Amethar had affirmed.</p><p>“Now,” Calroy had said, “can we shut up about your sister? It’s kind of completely a mood killer.”</p><p>“Right, yes, right,” Amethar had said, and Calroy had smiled. “There’s more important things at hand than the future.”</p><p> </p><p>Calroy waves. Calroy smirks and he waves and he’s positive Amethar can’t see him, positive Amethar’s hurtling too fast towards the ground, but Calroy has to have the last word, of course. So he waves. He smiles. He lets moonlight glint off the crown that he’s worn before, worn when Amethar was tired, when Amethar wanted to throw it to the ground, when Calroy took it out of his hands and placed it atop his own head of pink-and-white curls. Calroy waves and hopes his bravado can wash away the ache he’s feeling between his ribs, the ache he’s feeling in the place where he stabbed the man who called him a friend for over half his life.</p><p>“Goodbye, Amethar,” Calroy says, when he’s sure Amethar can’t hear him. “Thank you.”</p><p>He turns before he can see Amethar hit the ground. Part of him doesn’t want to watch the splatter of rock candy against the ground, the refraction of moonbeams through pink-and-green shards of man. And part of him simply has other matters to which he must attend.</p><p>Striding away from the edge of the parapet, he makes a quick to-do list. 1) Make contact with Amanda. 2) Check in on the situation of Caramelinda and the twins. Check in and make sure his seat is uncontested. Check in and make sure he doesn’t have to waste another watersteel dagger on an ungrateful royal that he loves a little too fiercely to be entirely pretend. 3) Be king.</p><p>Be king. Simple, really. Amethar managed to fuck it up, but that’s not surprising, considering how he never expected he’d have to rule. Never trained to do it, never thought about it, never even considered it to be a possibility until the day his final sister took her final breath.</p><p>Calroy’s different. Calroy’s been preparing for this day for decades.</p><p>And it feels… empty, kind of.</p><p>Is this what it means to be king? Is it burdens and empty smiles, a knowledge that you can never trust anyone around you? Is it picking your way across a field of flowers with a snake’s fangs stuck in your ankle? Is it as tiring as all this?</p><p>Bulb above. Calroy’s been king for all of ten minutes and he’s already falling into angst and drama. He’s better than this. He isn’t a Rocks. He’s no-nonsense under the veneer of theatre, under the posturing and the smooth talk. He knows what he wants and he knows how to get it, and now that Amethar’s gone, this should feel simple.</p><p>He summons Amanda. He needs a drink. He needs fresh air. He needs to forget the feeling of Amethar against him, needs to forget the sound a crown makes as it hits the floor, pushed haphazardly off of Amethar’s head. He needs to regroup, refocus, make plans. He needs to always be one step ahead. </p><p>After all, what other way can a scrappy upstart survive? Calroy’s been preparing for this for far too long. His wife, too soft, too forgiving, is dead at his hands. Amethar is dead at his orders, and his sisters were killed by the daggers cut from Calroy’s words, too. He’s dragged himself from nothingness into infamy, and he thinks that bloodstained hands are a small price to pay for governmental upheaval. In the history books, his portrait will be spotless. In the history books, he’ll have washed his skin clean, no spots to be found. In the history books, there’ll be no ghost behind his shoulder. There’ll be nothing but Calroy and his smile and his crown. Calroy and his country and throne.</p><p>Calroy watches his king fall, and Calroy doesn’t feel like a traitor. Doesn’t feel like he’s committing any unholy acts of treason. Calroy watches his king fall, and Calroy feels the birthright a self-made man is owed drop into his red-flecked hands.</p><p> </p><p>They’d snuck back to camp giggling like teenage girls that night. Amethar had slung his arm around Calroy’s shoulders, had pressed kisses between his curls and his teeth and his fingers, and Calroy had let him, because what was the harm in seducing a man he didn’t care about? He was allowed to have some fun, wasn’t he?</p><p>They hadn’t woken anyone up, thankfully. Subterfuge aside, Calroy wasn’t sure how he’d explain his swollen lips, his messy hair, the undone laces of his shirt. Amethar was a prince, after all, and shacking up with a nobody from nowhere would probably not be very becoming of him.</p><p>They’d slipped into a tent, just the two of them, and Amethar had not let go. Even then, Amethar had had an issue with letting go. He’d loved too hard, too fast, too unforgivingly. He’d fallen for Calroy, and he’d fallen for Catherine, and he’d fallen for Caramelinda, too, though in a very different way, and he’d never picked himself back up. He’d never really wanted to.</p><p>That had baffled Calroy. Amethar was so… well, open. Free. Honest. It had made Calroy uncomfortable. How could Amethar go around knowing that everyone saw him for what he was? How could Amethar live as himself and be content with that? How could Amethar put his flaws forward and know that people would love him for those flaws, not in spite of them?</p><p>So, no, Calroy hadn’t been all sunshine and daisies. Calroy had known he had a mission, a task to accomplish. Calroy had ordered Rococoa struck down, and Calroy had sighed into Amethar’s mouth as Amethar had attempted to relieve himself of the misery of his sister’s death the next day, and Calroy had enjoyed both things equally. Separately. Amethar was– Calroy hadn’t had a word for it. A world above, maybe. A world apart. A little bit untouchable. Eternally unfallen.</p><p>And they’d fought side by side, and Calroy had watched him fly off with other people, men and women and anyone who didn’t align with either, and Calroy hadn’t been jealous, not really, but he’d been wary. He couldn’t let Amethar slip through his fingers. He couldn’t relinquish control.</p><p>He’d never had to worry long, though. Sooner or later they always found themselves slipping away in the dead of night, grabbing desperately at the weak spots in each others’ armor between battles, pressing up against each other when they should have been sleeping.</p><p>It wasn’t that Amethar was devoted, necessarily, or, Bulb forgive, a monogamous twenty-something-year-old. It was just that Calroy was dependable. Always there, always willing to put himself into Amethar’s hands. It was just that Calroy, somehow, became the person Amethar trusted most. It was just that Calroy made himself feel synonymous with the home Amethar was so fervently fighting for. It was just that Calroy was someone deserving of a raised sword and shield. It was just that Calory was easy to love. It was just that Calroy was a lie, was whatever Amethar needed him to be, was a shifting mask of sympathy and support and distraction. It was just that Calroy was <em> good, </em>plain and simple, and Amethar was good, too, plain and simple, and they could be so sickeningly good together. They could be anything Amethar wanted.</p><p>So Calroy’d seen each of Amethar’s sisters die, had seen Amethar help win the war, had seen a crown placed on the head of a man he told himself he didn’t love. Calroy had been there through it all. Calroy had become Amethar’s advisor, had been his best man at Amethar’s wedding, had occupied a place in Amethar’s life and bed that Caramelinda always left vacant.</p><p>So Calroy had been dependable. So Calroy had been the first person Amethar could turn to. So Calroy could stick a dagger between Amethar’s ribs and hit Amethar’s heart without actually coming anywhere near it.</p><p> </p><p>“So?” Amanda asks. She leans forward, elbows on her knees, hair spilling over her shoulder, and looks less like the Queen’s Champion and more like the young woman she once was. She’s eager, smile wide, lines of age and war disappearing under the glow of excitement that sparks from her eyes.</p><p>“So,” Calroy says. “I killed him.”</p><p>Amanda clasps her hands together. “And?”</p><p>“And what? There’s no <em> and </em>,” Calroy snaps. “So I killed him. So I’m in control. So this is my castle.”</p><p>“No, I get that,” Amanda says. “I just– do you have any plans for his body? Where <em> is </em>his body, anyway?”</p><p>“Somewhere down at the base of the walls,” Calroy says dismissively. He feels antsy for some reason, eager to take a walk. Eager to get away from Amanda and her smile and her ponytail. “I’ll send you or someone else to pick it up tomorrow. For now we can let carrion birds feast. It feels appropriately improprietous for a fallen ruler, does it not?”</p><p>“Sure,” Amanda says, raising an eyebrow. “But you really don’t want me to go now?”</p><p>“Get some rest,” he tells her. “It’s… it’s been a long night.”</p><p>“Do you want to ta–”</p><p>“That’s an order,” Calroy says, voice coming out a bit more firm and a bit less patient than any self-respecting politician would let himself be. “That’s an order from your new king, Sir Maillard.”</p><p>She leaves him be, and he feels himself relax. Feels his shoulders drop down, his head loll to one side, his eyes flutter shut. Feels the life of a man he could have maybe been with, had things been different, drop from his fingertips and from the corners of his mouth, and feels like he needs to take a nap.</p><p>Candia is a large place. King is a weighty title. Calroy’s older, now, not <em> old </em> , not yet, but old enough that his jaw stretches around the vowels of the words <em> king Calroy </em> , <em> first of his name </em>.</p><p> </p><p>He’d watched the twins grow up, and he’d loved them. They were faultless, of course. They weren’t Amethar. Neither of them was a bad king, a bad husband, a man too invested in himself to feel the instability of his country rocking directly below his feet. They were little bundles of—well, not of joy, because Calroy would never call changing a baby’s diaper anything akin to joy, but certainly of life. Life was something that Amethar was missing. Life was something that Calroy had forgotten to find the beauty in.</p><p>There was Theo, too, and Lapin, but Calroy was always the twins’ favorite. He felt bad about that, just a little. A twinge of guilt tugged at his heartstrings as he looked a five-year-old Jet in the eye and saw her life end at the tip of a dagger. A bit of regret pushed its way between his eyes as he held Ruby in his arms and rocked her to sleep.</p><p>Not enough, though. Never enough. He knew when he signed up for this that he’d have to do anything necessary to dethrone the Rocks family, and even if he kept pushing back the date of the coup, he knew he’d do it eventually.</p><p>Probably.</p><p>Well, he couldn’t prove Belizabeth right, could he? He couldn’t let her think he was getting soft. He couldn’t allow her to run her own girlfriend down in the street and wimp out on murdering the man he refused to love. </p><p>Calroy was better than that. Stronger than that. Calroy was not going to give up so easily. Calroy was not going to betray the people to whom he’d promised an uprising.</p><p> </p><p>Was it really only a few minutes ago that Calroy felt Amethar against him for the last time? Was it really only a few minutes ago that the king fell, fell like a shooting star, fell like a saint’s disgrace? Was it really only a few minutes ago Calroy spit his hatred at Amethar, at his luck, at his refusal to do <em> anything </em>with his privilege? Hours feel like days. Seconds feel like hours. Calroy feels like he needs to go to sleep.</p><p>And he can hear Jet and Ruby in his head, can hear the tears he’s wiped off of Jet’s cheeks too many times hitting the place where Amethar’s body lays. Can hear Ruby’s screams, her protests.</p><p>He tells himself he doesn’t care. He tells himself their misery is a symphony of his own triumph, the cacophony that falls out of a victor’s heralding trumpets. </p><p>And, really, he’s okay. He’s okay. He’s been preparing for this a long time, and he is not a traitor. To be a traitor would imply he was loyal to the Rocks in the first place. To be a traitor would imply betrayal. To be a traitor would be too forgiving to Amethar, too forgiving to the idiot that got distracted by Calroy’s fingertips against his thigh and Calroy’s mouth against his neck and Calroy’s words worming their way into his heart. </p><p>Rotten apples dipped in sickeningly sweet sugar. Calroy’s spent years disguising himself, sure, spent years lying and deceiving and convincing Amethar to fall in love with a man that does not exist, but Calroy’s never betrayed anyone. He’s loyal to Belizabeth, to the cadre of backstabbing, power-hungry villains, to a pile of people to which he’ll be glad to pull himself atop. He’s loyal to a Candia that deserves purification. He’s loyal to himself, to the vows he made to take power out of the hands of those undeserving, to cause some real change in the world, to feel the cold press of a crown against his brow and to fully appreciate how it felt.</p><p>Lost in thought, Calroy almost doesn’t realize that he’s standing in front of Amethar’s bedchambers as opposed to the guest room he, at least by name, sleeps in while staying at the castle. And that’s fine, because Calroy’s taking Amethar’s place, so why not take his bedchambers, too? It’s not as if this is anything sentimental. It’s an assertion of power, that’s all. That’s what all of this was, all these years of letting Amethar push him against trees and walls and mattresses, all these years of politicking his way past Amethar’s wife, all these years of ruling a kingdom from behind the scenes. Puppet strings, power plays. Landing himself in Amethar’s empty bed. Landing himself on the throne.</p><p>Calroy’s too tired to change his clothes, so he shucks off his boots and stares at his hands for just a minute too long before ultimately deciding that the blood underneath his nails can stay there for a few more hours. </p><p>He lies back, nearly colliding with the headboard while aiming for the pillow, and Amethar’s bed bends easily under Calroy’s weight, the way it’s bent for him so many nights before. Calroy pulls the covers up to his chin and tucks his legs in and prays his sleep is dreamless.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>thanks for reading! kudos/comments always appreciated, especially on such a clusterfuck of a disaster as this fic lol. find me @commaperson on twitter!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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